Stargate (43 page)

Danarion began to write with a trembling hand as Yarne read from the book and interspersed his reading with his own observations. “‘Sholia went through the Gate to Danar. Janthis refused her pleas for help. In the room the Book of What Will Be was guarded by Chilorn, yet Sholia was tempted and almost fell …' At least we know that by Danar the writer must mean the constellation Danic, though what the symbolism of the Gate is we can as yet only guess. Perhaps it was a matter of religion. If the ancients worshiped the stars of Danic as a god and had built a temple to it with a sacred Gate, the problem is partially solved, and perhaps the vast hall the new digging has uncovered in the mountain may be such a temple.” Danarion wrote the words. A sickness was on him, and if Yarne had asked him a question, he would not have been able to reply.

At noon a bell rang, very clear and sweet in the room, and Yarne closed the book and stretched. “My Lady calls me,” he said. “Put the book away, Chilka, and go and eat. Bring your son to me later. Take care to cover the ink.” He went out, and Danarion went to the book, placed it back in the case, and then walked slowly along the other cases.

Yarne's gleanings were small. Scraps of brocaded cloth, bells corroded and thickened with age, the flue of a fountain made in the likeness of a corion of Danar, some timber from a ship, now crystallized but still with the haeli wood's faint glow of blue, and most incongruous of all, a sea-rotted roof tile from Shaban. Fuel for an obsession, Danarion thought, fuzzy with emotional exhaustion. Why is Yarne so obsessed? Why do I sense some lack in him, something unfocused? And why is he, so wealthy and favored, unable to write? Chilka had no answers. Danarion's essence ached with pain. He covered the ink pots and went out into the echo of ceaseless babble and the miasma of smoke which columned from the hall below to the unseen ceiling.

Nenan's familiar voice happily recounting his adventures of the morning served to spread balm over Danarion's hurts. Together they crossed the courtyard and entered the blackened dining room where the slaves ate under the eye of several guards, and Nenan greeted first one and then another slave with an easy grace that told Chilka how the young man had spent his time. “It is not altogether a place of nightmare,” Nenan said to him between mouthfuls of soup. “It seems to me that the slaves are not ill-used and have much freedom, limited of course. I have seen no two-minds yet, but how beautiful and populous the city looks through the cracks in the gate!”

“And how beckoning!” Chilka grinned. “The girls are fair, Nenan, and the fruit ripe. The wine is sweet, and the sun is hot. But wait until night comes, when you and I are locked in our cell, not loose in the streets as we were last night, and you cannot run away.”

That afternoon Chilka took Nenan to meet Yarne. Yarne seemed content to smile and nod at him and ask him what he wished to do, setting him a few small tasks around his own quarters and sending him away. Chilka spent the remaining hours of daylight at the desk while Yarne translated the ancient language of the book and added his musings, later preparing the young man's food for him and serving it on the desk. Yarne slept next door to the relic room, where he had a bed, a chest for his clothes, and a table, all expensively appointed, yet he did no more than sleep there. He lived among the relics when he was not riding to one of his diggings.

At sunset the guards came for Chilka, and he surrendered himself to them with a polite word of good-night to his master. As he was marched down the stair he heard the bell in the relic room tinkle once and knew that the Lady had summoned her brother again.

Night fell. Chilka lit a candle, and by its light he and Nenan sat on the floor talking. Ishban was suddenly silent.

“I wish the cell had a window,” Nenan complained, and Chilka shook his head.

“I think when you have spent many nights here, you will be glad you cannot see out, even into the courtyard. At first it is not bad, but after a while the sickness of Ishban begins to prey on you. Sometimes it follows you into your dreams. And the two-minds are not always as harmless as they seemed to us last night. Once, just before I was taken for the first time, the cells were unlocked in the middle of the night. The slaves were dragged to the top of the House, up that winding parapet we saw, and dropped one by one into the courtyard. They say the two-minds did not speak. They simply disposed of all their slaves.”

Nenan shuddered. “Surely the guards could have stopped them!”

“The guards were taken also. Listen, Nenan. It has begun.”

They sat for a while in silence while beyond the wall thin wails broke on the air and from above in the House the sounds of despair filtered down to them.

In the cell next to theirs a man began to melody. He had a strong, lusty voice, full of life and sunlight, and the tune was a rollicking drinking song that drowned out the sighings and shufflings above. But soon he had exhausted his medley, and once more the madness seeped through their cell's walls. Nenan played with the candle, picking off melted wax and passing his finger through the flame, and he was very pale.

“What did you think of Yarne?” Chilka asked to take his mind off the insanity around them, and Nenan managed a smile.

“He is very beautiful, but not womanish, although I have never seen a woman as lovely as he. Is he as gentle as he seems?”

“I don't think it is gentleness. Yarne simply does not think like anyone else I know.”

“What does he do at night?”

Chilka's gaze focused slowly on the yellow beam of the candle. “He spends most of the dark hours with the Lady. His sister.”

In the morning the sun shone, the cells were unlocked, and the life of the House resumed its cheerful, chaotic way. After they had eaten, Chilka took Nenan and a guard and went into the city to the nearest market, where the produce from the surrounding countryside was brought in fresh at daybreak. He chose food for Yarne carefully, and Nenan was allowed to wander in sight of the guard. He looked into the dark entrances of shops, teased smiles from the girls, and gaped like the country boy he was at the crowds pushing around him while the farmers stood behind their mounds of vegetables and their hanging rabbits and barked their invitations to buy.

His purchases made, Chilka was lingering among the stalls when he heard someone say, “Isn't that him?” Heads turned in uncomprehending curiosity. “That's the one-mind!” someone else shouted, and before long they were jostling around Chilka, trying to touch him, pulling his hair, all talking at once.

“He came back from the dead!”

“He took an arrow that opened his heart, my husband told me.”

“The Lady was there disguised as a soldier, and she breathed life into him again …”

“The Lady has made him a two-mind …”

“No, he's a god in disguise. He's come to Shol to learn wisdom from her.”

The guard had jumped to protect Chilka, and Nenan was elbowing his way through the excited people.

“Is it true? How did you do it? Have you seen the Lady? What does she look like?”

Chilka tried to prevent his basket from being upset and looked around with a momentary bewilderment.

Above the noise of the crowd came a louder, more insistent cry. “Save us!” The shouting ceased. Quiet pooled out, and the people suddenly became still. Then someone else took it up, and the square became full of chanting. “Save us! Save us! Save us!” The sound had an undercurrent of both desperation and an ominous threat. Chilka, catching Nenan's eye at last, saw that the young man's reserve had dropped around him again. His glance was frightened and respectful, the regard of a stranger. Chilka reached out and grasped his arm.

“Begin to walk slowly toward the House,” the guard said, himself white under the bluster. “Whatever you do, don't run.” Nenan shouldered his way to lead. Chilka followed him, careful to look only at his straight back, and the guard brought up the rear. Slowly they left the market, but the crowd surged after them, still chanting. Bystanders joined it, not knowing what was happening but happy to shout and wave also, and it was a flood of humanity that washed up against the gate and broke when the three men slipped through.

The guard mopped his brow. “God indeed!” he snapped. “I don't know how these rumors get started. Not from the captain, but from his soldiers, I suppose. Go about your business, Chilka. They'll soon get tired of wasting time, and besides, when night comes, they'll go home quickly enough.”

Chilka and Nenan walked unsteadily to the kitchens. “I had almost forgotten,” Nenan said in a low voice. “I wanted to forget!”

Chilka stopped and turned to him. “I want you to forget also, Nenan,” he replied, deeply troubled. “Sometimes I myself forget, and it is good to be Chilka alone. Let us both forget, until the time comes when I must act.”

Nenan smiled tremulously, but Danarion sensed the distance in him, the drawing away, and was hurt beyond measure.

The crowd scattered just before sunset, but that night it seemed to Chilka that the sounds of loss and anguish were louder than before in the shadows beyond the sheltering gate, and he fancied that he heard his name called in the House several times. Nenan lay on the bed and answered his attempts at conversation with noncommittal grunts. Presently he slept, but his sleep was troubled, and Chilka sat and watched him twitch and moan.

“Are you really a god?” Yarne asked him the next morning before they began their work, and Chilka laughed.

“No, master. I am Chilka, your slave.”

“Well, why do the people stand outside the gate and shout for you? The captain went out and told them how you were only wounded.”

“They do not believe it. They have a need to believe something else.”

“What?”

“That I have come to save them from themselves.”

Yarne did not reply. Again that curious stillness fell on him, the seeming absence of all the tiny movements that show life in even the most motionless of men. In his throat the heartbeat throbbed, unchanging and unvarying in its ponderous rhythm. When he did speak again, it was to begin the dictation.

For many days crowds continued to gather at the gate. Soldiers tried to drive them away, but they always came back. The three judges, Melfidor, Veltim, and Fitrec, who processed across the courtyard in their stiff brocaded robes of gold and blue with their guards before and their slaves behind, spoke to them scornfully, but it made little difference. At night it often seemed to Chilka that the whole of Ishban was congregated just outside the frail protection of his cell, moaning and wailing for him in reproach and longing. Time finally did what soldier and ruler could not. Chilka took care to stay in the House unseen by them, and eventually they forgot why they had come, lost interest, and went home. Only a handful stubbornly came every day, convinced that behind a slave's lined face there was a thing of exotic power or an example of miracle, but Chilka was able to slip past them with Nenan unremarked.

As day flowed into day Danarion felt himself tied ever more strongly to the man that had been, his essence nestling closer into Chilka's warm cells. With an increasing effort he tried to remember his purpose in Ishban. He suspected that the mysterious Lady would hold the answer to the whereabouts of the Gate if only he could reach her. He prowled the House in the evenings before his guard came for him, climbing the stair to the door without handles or lock behind which she lived, following little-used passages that might reveal another entrance to her chamber but which always ended in dusty storerooms or forgotten balconies. Sometimes he stood outside the House, craning upward to the slitted windows of her room, overcome with frustration at the sheerness of the rock wall. He read Shol's Annals in the hours when Yarne was with his sister, hoping that Sholia's words might provide a clue. He listened to the gossip of the streets and the often incoherent babbling of the two-minds in the night but heard nothing of consequence. Gradually his sense of urgency began to fade, until a moment came when he stood facing the Lady's door and wondered why he was there. He knew he wanted to see her, that somehow she was connected to the thing that had happened to him by the lake, but Chilka whispered in his mind, You were so badly wounded. Death entered you for a second, bringing strange visions, changing you. There is a scar on your mind to match the visible weal on your body. This insanity will heal, this dream of sun-lords and worlds in space, this spurious other self who has such power will slowly weaken as the memory of death recedes. Lallin was right when she told you you had gone mad. His hand slid under his shirt, fingering the scar, and the feel of it was reassuring. Fate was kind to me, he thought as he turned back down the stair. It gave me back my life.

Summer faded into autumn, a brief season of rain and strong winds that collapsed into light snow and watery skies. Something told Chilka that Shol was a stranger to such seasonal definition, that snow was a new thing, that once the seasons could only be measured by a changing color on the trees and in the ocean and by the smell of the air, but he did not follow the thought.

He missed Lallin more as time went by, thinking of her sitting alone in the cottage, her shawl around her shoulders, her face turned placidly to the firelight, and sometimes he thought of her naked, that same firelight playing on her small, compact limbs and soft breasts, but those thoughts were old, dark memories, broken by the thing that had happened to him in the summer, by the lake.

Only at work with Yarne in the muffled quiet of the relic room did he reflect. Yarne puzzled him in a way he could not remember being puzzled before. The routine of his life had not dulled that nagging doubt. Yarne was a man distressed as much by a slave's empty belly as by the occasional execution in the city. He was easy to love, warm in his concern for Chilka and Nenan, uncomplicated in his devotion to the task he had been allowed to take on himself by the Lady. His beauty made one hold one's breath, and every morning Chilka was struck anew by the smooth transparency of the skin, the glittering blue eyes, the grace of hand, voice, and walk, the shining paleness of the matchless hair.